Margins of Excess delves into the chaotic intersection of fiction and fact in the post-truth era. The book follows the stories of six individuals in the United States who momentarily received nationwide attention for narratives that the media eventually dismissed as frauds or hoaxes. These include Herman Rosenblat’s invented Holocaust love story and Rachel Dolezal’s identification as Black. By weaving together personal interviews, press clippings, and staged photography, Pinckers explores how “hyper-individualized” truths are constructed and maintained, even when they conflict with objective reality. The physical book reflects this complexity through its use of varying paper stocks—such as thin yellow paper for interview transcriptions—to distinguish between different layers of evidence and narrative.